Forgiveness is a psychic mechanical action to"give it back" to them from whom it came.

What is unsuitable, unnatural, foreign, toxic, or indigestible energy?

Each person has a unique nature, and each person is organically equipped to solve one's own problems. This is how karma "obligatory action" works: one lesson after the next is delivered on the dasha timeline(sometimes several at once!)

The native must scramble to apply all available intelligence toward solving the scheduled problems. But if the problem is one's own, then it feels appropriate to be working on it. Solving our naturally suited and personally chosen karmic problems is precisely our purpose here on Earth, and these appropriate challenges will ultimately be resolved via building intelligence, creating a great spiritual benefit.

Toxic 'foreign energy' problems by contrast are sickening. Problems rightly owned by others, and which others should rightly be pursuing, can be implicated or insinuated into one's psychic space (aura) by irresponsible or ignorant others who are trying to offload their own tasks upon unwitting partners, fellow congregants, and family members.

Typically the perpetrators use the twin paralyzers of guilt and grief
as glue the toxic thoughts and feelings into one's space. Because one does in fact have the correct matching energy, foreign instructions can easily slide in, under protection of camouflage. The most common perpetrators are parents, siblings, spouse-partners, and work bosses. The English signal word for guilt-laden toxic foreign energy is should .

It is unsuitable because one does not want to do it or cannot do it; the unsuitability has been proven because one had tried (and tried) to manage the feeling or follow the instruction but it continuously fails materially or makes one feel physically or emotionally sick.

Stepwise Process

Forgiveness is a healing process of

identifying a feeling or instruction (belief) which is unsuitable to one's own nature.

deciding w who it came from

acknowledging that this unsuitable, toxic, or unproductive feeling or
instruction foreign energy was initially attracted into one's own space via the like-attracts-like mechanism
of matching energy

removing t that feeling or thought from one's own personal kinesthetic aura space

speaking the performative statement (spell): I hereby return this energy to ___________ to whom it properly belongs.

monitoring one's own space to ensure that the habitual insinuations of should do not creep in again

repeating these steps until the entitlement to be free of this unsuitable energy is firmly established

Forgiveness is the single biggest gift one can ever give to oneself.

Forgiveness will release one from the psychic and emotional bondage that keeps one imprisoned in bitterness, resentment, anger, grief, and guilt.

Forgiveness is the key to creativity, positive energy, and spiritual freedom.

Forgiveness does not mean condoning or justifying the harmful acts done by others.

The laws of karma ensure that those who do harm will themselves be harmed, when their time comes. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the basic tribal rules of social justice, apply in some version in all cultures.

We can have faith that justice will be done.

However the timing of redress is usually beyond any one individual's control, and the karmic system allows delayed paybacks - sometimes many lifetimes down the road.

Forgiveness is the end of hurt , for the forgiver. But for the perpetrator, their decision to harm others predicts a great deal of pain in their future.

~~ Ramayana Bala Kanda 33.7

"Forgiveness is an ornament of both men and women."

Social Justice and Its Limits

Many of us were raised to believe that we are personally responsible for making sure that justice gets done in our world.

We have an admirable ethic of social accountability that commands us to stay personally involved in civilization's progress toward greater justice, fairness, and humanistic opportunity for all. These are great and worthy ideals on the large group programming level (Shani).

At the social level, material crimes against life and property, doing physical harm to another, and many types of objectively measurable improprieties (such as financial crimes and minority discrimination) can be punished for quick payback.

As societies become more sophisticated and stable, they can devote more and more attention to the welfare of their members. Social justice continues to advance and retreat on a 26,500 year time scale.

At the moment we are on the way up (believe it or not) and human welfare on a large-group scale is increasingly better protected.

But we are certainly not living in a just world. Far from it. Many crimes remain socially unlegislated, undocumented, and unrecognized. People constantly hurt each other in ways that various societies cannot yet afford to acknowledge.

There are still plenty of places where murder of wife or child is not punished. The karmic system will of course punish these murderers, but their society does not recognize the crime.

Even in supposedly advanced cultures, the social resources do not yet exist to document and punish parents who verbally abuse their children. Yet children are damaged for life after this type of abuse.

And more subtle types of harm to others such as death - how could the terrible damage which the death of a spouse, parent, or child inflicts on those "left behind" ever be legislated? Yet the agonizing loss, the crippling grief, the bitter sorrow of losing a loved one often linger for a lifetime.

There are many kinds of pain, misery, and grief which must remain deeply private.

So, due to either society's inability to recognize the crime or the inherently private nature of the damage, there are many ways for one person to be hurt by another person which may never be publicly redressed.

Karmic law works beautifully. But, because the karmic system is vastly bigger than any one person can even understand - let alone control - it is humanly impossible for any one person to control the timing of the payback.

Only the eye of the Divine can see the full scope of this huge process and only Divine Intelligence can set the perfect payback timing.

Holding onto resentment, guilt, anger, and sorrow from the past, is a psychic disaster. It takes a HUGE amount of creative energy to manage our detailed inventory of past hurts and grievances.

Each review of a small disappointment takes a little bit of energy. The catalog of life's normal losses, deaths, and separations takes time and initiative to supervise. Maintaining the very deepest memories of catastrophically horrible abuse - whether from war, or starvation, or vicious private crimes - also drains off a massive amount of psychic energy.

If one feels personally responsible for binding the perpetrator(s) to oneself using chains of angry blame to ensure that they cannot escape until they are properly punished - then one must find the energy to maintain those chains. The amount of psycho-emotional energy required to hold negative memories is similar to the amount of electricity needed to run a massive deep-freezer.

Psychically, one is always on duty, always on guard to ensure that the prisoner does not escape.

The energy needed to maintain the deep-freeze is taken out of reserves that could be used for attracting love, developing creativity, and building wealth. Those energy reserves could fund education, travel, and romance. But the more deeply one invests in the commitment to hold the perpetrator until they are properly punished, the less energy one has to do anything creative at all.

In the end, clinging to memories of injustice is so debilitating and exhausting that it not only drains off most of our creative, joyful potential -- this clinging also robs the body's life force and makes one physically sick. (See"The List" in Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life . )

Forgiveness breaks the chains of Guilt and liberates a huge amount of energy

It may very well take more than one lifetime to see the payback, or the payback may occur in ways that we do not have the consciousness to perceive. It is critically important to let go of the guilt that says,"I have to see this through. I have to make sure that the person who harmed me gets punished."

Holding the memory, repeating the crime in one's mind over and over, creates bondage to the crime. Both the harmer and the harmed are enslaved to a bond of guilt until the perpetrator suffers an equal type and amount of pain, as the victim.

FoForgiveness breaks the guilt bond.

The perpetrator is convicted at the moment of committing the crime.. They will pay, one way or another - but leave the precise execution of this rule in God's hands. Even if the crime is socially recognized and there is a trial and a punishment, there are still many levels of damage that society cannot address.

Even in the USA with capital punishment, a family whose daughter has been murdered will have some 'closure' when the murderer is himself murdered by the state. But can the state recompense a lifetime of loss, bitter grief, and rage ? For all those terrible hurts and miseries that "an eye for an eye" will never address, it is crucially important to engage forgiveness.

There was a fellow speaking in Nazareth who made this point some time ago...

It only makes sense. The price we pay for trying to micro-manage a system that is so much bigger than we are, is lifetime exhaustion and imprisonment in guilt and grief.

The cost to give up that misery? Totally free. Just"give forth" - let go and hand the job back to the One who is suited to do it. By design.

A wonderful, practical guide to step-by-step forgiveness = You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay (orig. 1984)

Louise Hay's instructions for unloading old fear and resentment are direct, loving, clear, and complete.

Louise explains how to heal even the most bitter, devastating, and severe childhood trauma -- and the diseases that this trauma will eventually cause.

You Can Heal Your Lifeis one of those if I had only one book to take to a desert island classics. If you get this book, I recommend reading two sections from the back of the book - Louise's own story
and The List -first.

Forgiveness seems so easy... but in practice - real practice - forgiveness is very difficult indeed...

In any relationship - but especially the queen of all relationships "marriage" - resolution of conflict requires dissolution of false ego.

Note: ego-membrane dissolution is painful and tricky, and should not be attempted by those who are not spiritually ready.

If one is ready, of course, the spiritual prize is irreplaceable: priceless faith and inner peace.

No one who has ever gone this route with sincerity will ever turn back.

Ask them.

Forgiveness is Enlightening

Once you embark on the path of authentic
forgiveness (not to be confused with the false paths of suppression or denial!)
the enlightenment - read: unburdenment - is so satisfying, so relaxing, and so liberating - one feels so light- that everyone who is truly ready To pursue forgiveness as their primary response to the Other in relationships , is a total cheerleader for the idea.

It works great. Ask any real Christian, real Buddhist, real Muslim, real Hindu, real Jew, any honest and observant practitioner of any spiritual path. They'll confirm, this is the way.

But it is painful in the beginning emotionally, and very tricky mentally.Don't jump on this bandwagon without some serious forethought. The mind is addicted to ego-processing.

We have to be very, very skillful in moderation of forgiveness, pacing the rate of grievance-release and allowing the false identity of ego-based Self to fall away slowly .

~~ A Course in Miracles

"What could you not accept,

if you but knew that everything that happens,

all events, past, present, and to come, are gently planned

by One Whose only purpose is your good?"

What to do with an
unemployed citizen: the out-of-work mental narrative

The tricky part is how to reliably support one's instinctive sense of Self, once the crutch of ego-membrane is
minimized or largely gone. What happens to the mental narrative when it has nothing to do? No values transactions (your way? my way? some compromise?) No negotiation. No discussions, agreements, or balance to strike? No conflicts to mediate? When there is no Self to represent Me at the arbitration table?

It goes berserk of course. It does not go quietly
away.

Depending on how old you are (in the current incarnation, and in terms of parallel lives - , we're all pretty old!) consider how long this
mental narrative has been in business. It likes its regular routine. It
is comfortable in its habits. It likes its dominant position in the
field of consciousness. It likes its control.

Most people think that their mental narrative *is* their
consciousness, yes?

When threatened with abandonment, the mental narrative goes on an
argumentative rampage. It wants its old job back. It goes on protest mode, insisting on its
entitlements ... something similar to a socio-culturally guaranteed "right to work".

This situation is mentioned in scripture of all the world's religions because it is so essential to managing ongoing spiritual practice. We must know what to do with the mind and its attachment to ego-Self before embarking on the path of forgiveness.

Forgiveness means giving it back.

Psychically speaking, forgiveness means returning the harmful energy (hatred, anger, insult, physical force, etc.) back to the one from whom it came. Forgiveness means saying "I'm not going to hold on to what you just did or said. You can have that energy back. I don't want to have to manage that thing and my response to it."

When it becomes habitual, forgiveness is an instinctive, knee-jerk back-atcchya. One labels harmful energy
return to sender and whacks it out of the aura in a natural boomerang reflex.

The conscious person skillfully identifies incoming threats to the ego-membrane and sends these threats back out, pronto, before the threat goes deeper and the ego-membrane is forced to generate a more complex defensive response. This sounds fairly easy and it is. We do this every day by jusr refusing to"take the bait"."Just say no."

But the awareness has to be in place before one can
remember to be on guard and swat these pesky parasites out of the aura before they can enter and breed. It takes effort to remember to forgive.

Forgiveness is not natural; forgiveness is learned.

It is *not* normal and natural to forgive (although it can become habitual over time). It is normal and natural and rigorously socially enforced, to store up offenses and wait to get redress. (Christians will recall that Jesus has something very specific to say about payback.)

Secular society Shani encourages its citizens to invest their faith in legal justice, and the lower forms of most religions also teach that"right" people are rewarded and"wrong" people are punished in an afterlife of some sort.

Most of us spend a good part of each day managing a huge inventory of offenses large and small, conducting internal discussions about who is right and who is wrong, with subjects ranging from the justice of holy war to matters of personal hygiene.

The false ego-membrane is an elaborate structure of moral and aesthetic convictions which determine life practice. Any adult who has different life practices (connected to underlying beliefs) is inherently a threat to the validity of our ego-membrane structure, because there just can't logically be two conflicting"right" ways of living. (Ask G.F. Hegel; he's thought about it.)

The various parts of ego-skeleton are connected with a thick, semi-rigid ligament of overarching conviction that, if I am a"good" person, then I must be right. My way of doing things, whether a result of my upbringing, my reaction to trauma, or my conscious choice, simply must be right. That's how ego-membrane works.

The ego-membrane survives like any other living entity, by refusing to negotiate its core validity. It allows adaptation via negotiation at its periphery but not at its core. All of God's creatures survive this way. It is simply not natural to allow foreign energy to penetrate one's core. The ego-membrane says: I am right, therefore I am good. I am good, therefore I am right.

Healthy people do not walk around chanting"I am wrong, I am bad." (Sick people do; however in general, they are not going to last long.) We have to believe we are right if we are going to go forward in life making choices and being socially validated for those choices. In a healthy spirit of survival, we cherish our righteousness, and remain vigilant in its defense.

Therefore most of the time, when negative, invalidating energy attacks us from the outside, a healthy person can repel the attack with their outer shell ego-membrane defenses. We believe in our righteousness, deep down. Perhaps one is fired from a job or fails a college course. The accusation is bad, ignorant, incapable, incompetent.

It hurts. But work and school, as important as those functions are socially, are not arbiters or providers of core ego-membrane validation for most people. (Workaholics, other compensation-dysfunctions excepted.)

Most folks can move on to another class, another job, without major ego collapse. The boss or the professor may live on in memory forever as "wrong". The mind diligently records their offense within the elaborate memory structure of the ego-membrane (it is like a giant filing cabinet), and life moves on.

However very few people can blithely
move on after severe ego conflict in marriage, because the pain of intimate wounding in marriage is almost unbearably deep.

Marriage often forces the reluctant ego-membrane to at least *try* the possibility of forgiveness. The pain of ego-membrane invalidation, coming from the person closest to us in this life - the life-partner - is often unmanageable.

Some souls are driven to the final extreme -
forgiveness - in an effort to free themselves from a huge accumulation of toxic anger, humiliation, and grief acquired during failed identity negotiations with this most significant Other.

What is the purpose of this searing emotional pain and ego-membrane invalidation, , in the context of marriage and partnership?

In each life, certain intimate partners are permitted access to the soft, childlike, sensitive ego-membrane core - or very close to the core.

The degree and quality of loving intimacy is determined in Jyotisha by yuvati bhava in radix, by the overall pattern of the navamsha (particularly D-9 lagna axis) and by drishti to Moon.

These intimate partners are pre-assigned. They enter our current life by invitation. These intimates are souls with whom we have built a shared inventory of both trust and grief. They know us well.

The ego-self is established by the parents and upbringing, but our understanding of the Self is not fully valid until it is tested against another Self. Thus, we make arrangement to invite a (series of) testers who have permission to enter the Inner Sanctum of our personal truth.

Professional identity? Important, but not essential. Most people live their whole lives without a profession. Intellectual identity? It seems important to educated people, but very few will be emotionally destroyed by intellectual critique. But attack my love, the way I love, my right to be loved.

Create some reason why I am unloveable - perhaps I am ugly, or evil, or pervasively, incurably wrong. This, hurts. It doesn't hurt coming from a boss or a teacher, but it hurts horribly coming from a person with whom we have entered into a loving promise to love and protect.

The spouse has
one's detailed reasons.

Unless the two parties are enlightened beings, the negotiation for valid identity in marriage can get pretty intense. The more fragile the two egos, the more desperately anxious the negotiation.

Exhaustion and despair can reach such heights of anxiety in this life-defining struggle that married couples lose their sense of balance. Vicious arguments over things like toothpaste caps are well known. (I remember an argument over frozen cornwhich almost ended one of my core partnerships.)

The pain of ego-damage and the terrible anxiety caused by threat of ego-collapse is enough, for some people, to force consideration of forgiveness as a survival strategy in marriage.

If this is happening to you, you may be blessed to look back upon your troubled marriage and your hurtful partner as the best problem you ever had in your life.

Because, skillfully handled, the anger (ego-threat), pain, anxiety, and sorrow caused by marital conflict can force the spirit who is ready into a much broader campaign of
forgiveness which encompasses not only the spouse but all
the usual suspects who have harmed us in this life.

Once you build a strong habit of forgiveness, very little"sticks " to the ego-structure and one can go about one's earthly business unmolested.

Ironically this specific type of pain, pain of ego-conflict in marriage, can call attention to a historic spiritual problem which needs addressing anyway. One way or another, by hook or by crook, all spiritual paths lead toward the goal of ego-dissolution and union with the Divine.

If your path happens to be the Way of Marriage (or the Way of divorce , since it doesn't really matter whether the legal marriage survives this process) then congratulations, you found your path!

But do wait to embark on this path, seriously, until you are truly ready to let go of the pain. If the ego-membrane is still cherishing the pain, counting and recounting all the wrongs done and reciting the rules which prove the adversary was definitely wrong... then wait.

Forgiveness is for a little bit later, when you are saturated with toxic anger, exhausted by chronic reactivity, and bored or frustrated with reciting a liturgy of self-justification.

When you're ready.

How to get started - slowly and carefully

And before releasing my attachment to a particular defining attribute of my ego-self, so that when my partner (especially but not only in marriage) claims that "I" am wrong,

As the various skeletal or scaffolding structures of the ego-membrane are released - as we let go of attachment to ideas about ourselves and who we "are" ("I" am a collection of attributes), some supportive, guiding and structuring energy must come in to replace those ego-identity
bones that are turning to psychic jello.

Otherwise we get a mental health emergency, or even long-term psycho-emotional illness.

Not that it is really possible (the Divine protects us by making sudden enlightenment very rare) but if, theoretically, one were to instantaneously forgive everyone who had ever harmed us in one intense moment of massive
forgiveness - we would probably go insane.

Why? Because the ego-membrane functions as our social self-definition. All those little grievances, self-justifications and entitlements

What is *not* wanted is sudden ego-collapse caused by pulling out all the scaffolding at once. This is why a normal, functioning person with a robust ego-membrane will need high levels of consciousness and very probably spiritual mentor support before engaging in"forgiveness " with any depth of commitment to the process.

While some elements of self-identification"ego"are necessary to survive, most of the conflict caused by self-justification and daily defensiveness in marriage, comes from"false ego".

False ego-membrane is essentially the belief-system scaffolding established by our parents and teachers that helps us locate and stabilize our place in the social world. We are taught to believe that our way of doing things - morally, aesthetically, financially - is the right way.

In the absence of reliable caste indicators, a modern western person must rely on a complex of individual beliefs as his central identity
and thus "my way is the right way" is the mantra at the very center of Self.

When attributes of the spouse's identity complex conflict with attributes of my complex, I must defend my beliefs or lose my Self.

Or, so it seems. And definitely, so we have been trained.

There is a way out of this marriage-killing ego-membrane conflict which destroys happiness for so many. Not only the 50% who seek legal divorces but the countless millions living in sustained marital misery. Anyone can do it but it will help to see the ego-resistance patterns in yuvati bhava and navamsha in order to know where to target one's efforts.

Essentially,
edits of the marriage script require the power
to forgive the other spouse for their supposed transgressions against what
one may believe to good and true about oneself - , offenses against our ego-membrane structure. Hundreds of these offenses occur during each day of married life. They are the primary cause of
irreconcilable differences leading to divorce.

It requires considerable consciousness to forgive our spouse for being a unique soul who is different than us, for exposing our faults, and for forcing us into levels of awareness that our sleep-walking egos did not want to achieve.

forgiveness should not be confused with suppression or denial. Forgiveness does not erase the memory of the transgression.

Rather, forgiveness "gives back" the unsuitable (ego-assaulting) energy to the original sender, which gives the spouse permission to be a separate person, have their own tastes and values, and make their own judgments.

The trick is that their values and judgments are divinely theirs, not ours - and thus, we are completely freed from conflict and criticism in the marriage.

This is tricky business in a society that demands conformity and mutual ego-membrane validation in marriage. Conscious marriage is difficult and should not be undertaken without spiritual supervision.

On the other hand, unconscious marriage is relatively easy, although often extremely painful and oppressive,

Forgiveness is not noble.

If the motivation is to impress other people with one's nobility of spirit, forget it.

It's a common mistake.

The motive to do
the right thing -- by forgiving one's adversary, turning the other cheek etc., following the rules of the holy book in order to prove oneself a good person, to earn social validation - will always backfire, because unfortunately this approach will deepens the ego's attachment to being
morally correct.

Forgiveness cannot earn.

Forgiveness is a donation, a gift.

Forgiveness means
** give it forward ** return it ** give it away.

The only useful motive for forgiveness is utter desperation .

The decision to forgive, especially for really grievous emotional wounding, is a desperate act parallel to radical cancer surgery. No one in their "right mind" would start taking apart their ego, which is the instinctive core of our social survival.

We only do this in complete desperation, when all negotiation with the partner has failed.

When we are incapable of discussing the matter; exhausted in our attempts; have no new ideas; have reached a total impasse; and furthermore are in deep psycho-emotional pain.